1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to seat suspension systems for vehicles, in particular to seat suspension systems adapted to hold a seat cushion module.
2. Related Art
The underside of the modern vehicle seat is now becoming an electronic maze of gadgets. Numerous control and sensing modules, typically rectangular boxes, must be assembled into the seat suspension system. Many of the presently-used methods of assembling seat suspension systems and of suspending control modules therefrom are undesirable due to their labor-intensive assembly requirements.
There are numerous types of seat cushion modules that are suspended from a seat bottom. There are memory modules for seat settings (e.g. changing the height, distance from steering wheel, seat back tilt, etc.), air bag sensing (to determine if passenger seat is occupied and how heavy the occupant is), seat heater, air conditioning blower (for sensing circulation of cool air in seat), and others. For some seats, these modules are mounted by attachment of a metal structure to the seat frame. Other seats have an additional metal bracket specifically designed to hold the above-mentioned units. The bracket may be welded or screwed to the underside of the seat cushion frame. The modules will then be attached to the metal bracket. However, the cost of materials and labor, not to mention the added weight, of such metal brackets make this approach costly.
In addition to suspending a seat cushion module, another consideration that goes into manufacturing a seat suspension system is electrical insulation of the suspension wires so that the wires do not make electrical contact with the seat frame to which they are attached. One way that this has been achieved is by powder-coating the wires.
Finally, the seat suspension often comprises two or more wires, usually bent to cover a wider area, wherein the wires must be joined together to make a unitary suspension structure. A common way to join the wires together is to use additional wires that are twisted around the suspension wires to couple the suspension wires into a unitary structure. However, joining these wires together is also a labor-intensive, and hence costly, procedure.
What is needed is an improved seat suspension design which is easier to assemble than previous designs and is better adapted for receiving control modules for seat-related technologies.